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by missosoup 1980 days ago
Twitter+FB+ a single-digit handful of other platforms are the only mechanisms for a private individual to share an idea and have it spread to a wide audience.

Yes, you can make your own blog and post whatever you like on it (actually these days even that is questionable with cloud vendors deplatforming blogs they don't like), but the chances of your speech reaching a wide audience are millions of times smaller than if you just posted on one of those established platforms and your speech was allowed to spread without censorship.

The problem with your analogy is that your megaphone makes it virtually impossible for anyone else to have one. This was not the case in the early days of the internet prior to these hyper centralised platforms emerging. This is where both the law and just general public mindset hasn't yet caught up with the implications of modern social media. In business, we have anti-trust laws specifically for this scenario. In information and social media, we have nothing.

A cafe owner refusing service to an individual is not comparable to a global-scale speech platform selectively suppressing ideas that the owner doesn't like from reaching a wide audience.

1 comments

> Twitter+FB+ a single-digit handful of other platforms are the only mechanisms for a private individual to share an idea and have it spread to a wide audience.

Bullshit. They're merely the easiest. People were sharing ideas far and wide long before these companies came into existence. You have a right to free speech, no one is required to help you spread it.

> A cafe owner refusing service to an individual is not comparable to a global-scale speech platform selectively suppressing ideas that the owner doesn't like from reaching a wide audience.

Maybe not, but I've yet to see a good argument for why being a global scale speech platform inherently means that anyone has a right to tell Twitter who they can and cannot ban.

Again, I'm not saying there shouldn't be consequences for Twitter, I'm just saying that those consequences should be social, not legal.

I feel like the people here are arguing that the reason they should face legal consequences isn't that they've done anything illegal or that necessarily should be illegal, only that they don't think social consequences will work and they can't stand the idea that other people might not care as much about it as they do.